The Harbor Master eBook

applied the hatchet to the left side of the window.
He worked all round the sash in this way and at last
pushed it inward with both hands until it hung below
the sill by a couple of bent spikes. He thrust
the hatchet in his belt and entered the room.
He put up his hand to the rafter that crossed the low
ceiling and so felt his way along to the middle of
the room. Halting there, he removed the fur mitten
from his right hand and felt about until his chilled
fingers discovered a thin crack in the whitewash of
the rafter. The little square of dry wood came
away in his fingers. Next moment he held the
leather-bound casket in his hand. He opened it
and felt the cold jewels which he could not see.
Then he closed it, slipped it into a pocket, replaced
the square of wood in the beam and made his cautious
way back to the window. He crawled over the sill,
turned and tried to lift the sash upward and outward
to its place. The sash came up easily enough
but the bent spikes would not hold. After a few
minutes of fruitless effort he turned away, leaving
the window wide open. The sky was black as the
throat of a chimney. A breath of wind came from
the northwest. Foxey Jack Quinn was not weatherwise,
however. He climbed the path to the edge of the
barrens and turned to the north.

“Diamonds white an’ red,” he muttered.
“I seen ’em, and I knowed what they was.
Every little stone bes worth more nor all the fore-and-afters
on the coast. I bes a rich man now—­richer
nor the governor, richer nor any marchant in St. John’s—­richer
nor the king o’ England, maybe. Holy saints
be praised! Never agin will I wet a line at the
fishin’ nor feel the ache o’ hunger in
my belly. Denny Nolan will soon be cursin’
the day he batted me about like a swile.”

His plans for the immediate future were clear in his
mind but for the more distant future they were vague,
though rosy. He would make the ten miles to Brig
Tickle in less than three hours, and from there turn
a point or two westward from the coast and strike
across country to the head of Witless Bay. He
had a cousin in Witless Bay and could afford to rest
in that cousin’s house for a few hours.
There he would hire a team of dogs and make the next
stage in quick time. Dennis Nolan, who would
not discover the theft of the diamonds until after
sun-up, would be left hopelessly astern by that time.
So Quinn figured it out. On reaching St. John’s
he would go to a shebeen that he knew, in a narrow
and secluded back street, and there rent a room.
Then he would commence the business of disposing of
one of the diamonds. Just how he was to go about
this he did not know, but he felt sure that Mother
McKay, who kept the shebeen, would be able to give
him some valuable advice on the subject. And after
that? Well, the prospects were rosy but vague.
He would get word to his wife in some way to move
herself and the children to Witless Bay. He would
send her twenty dollars, and after that, for the rest